We have a nice old 18th century farmhouse here in the Berkshire foothills and a swimming pool (Connecticut-type, which means that it gets fouled up with algae and salamanders, and is box-, rather than kidney-shaped) and a place to play croquet and a lot of mice in the attic. For the East Coast, we are in the middle of nowhere, which suits me just fine. The we is my wife, Rose from Baltimore, and daughter Susanna, age 3, though we, I guess, are what you might call a quasi-four, since another is on the way and is due early in March. There are just enough people around within spitting distance—mainly literary queers—to keep the solitude from being oppressive, and we manage to get to N.Y. (85 min) often enough to retain the tremendous veneer of culture and sophistication we are so celebrated for here on the Atlantic Seaboard. So it is not too bad; it seems to snow a lot, and often seems as cold as it must get in Jamestown, N.D., but you’ve got to live somewhere.
To fill you in on my whereabouts since the Marine bondage, as briefly as I can: I got out of Duke in ’47 and went to N.Y. and became the most unsuccessful editor that McGraw-Hill ever had. After this debacle I decided that there was only one thing left to do and that was to redeem myself by writing a book that would expose McGraw-Hill. Well, this didn’t turn out very well as a leitmotif, but I did hole up in Nyack, N.Y., and wrote a spook-ridden, guilt-laden, desperate novel about Virginia which, as you probably know, came out in 1951. After that I bummed around in Paris for a year or so, and got a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, where I went for a most unprofitable year—except for the exposure to Italy and for meeting Rose there. We were married, amid much panoply, at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio. When we came back we spent a year in New York—a total waste of time—and since early 1955 we’ve been holed up here in Roxbury. Probably the most unexciting career a youngish writer has had since the days of Walter Pater.
At present I am under contract to Random House for a novel, and am 800+ monstrous pages along toward the end. I don’t think it will ever end, although now I am so far up to my ears in it that I don’t really care. What with sputniks, Lawrence Welk, critics and God knows what else, the novel seems to me a fairly useless form of expression, as is “art” increasingly in general, but I have made my bed and will try to fit into it somehow. I can always console myself with the fact that there are worse things to be doing—and there really are: working for B.B.D. & O., for instance, or working one’s self up the ladder in the United States Marine Corps. Or writing for television. In the meantime, parts of this novel really aren’t half bad. It’s laid in Italy and is full of murder and rape and all sorts of romantic trash, and will appeal mainly to the discontented middle-class matrons who make up the bulk of our reading population anyway, but parts of it are really O.K. and the hero—a true enfant du siècle, full of all sorts of morbid longings—is, I think, a very successful creation.
Someday I want to get down on paper those Marine Corps days of ours. They were really too unheroic and sordid to be very valuable as fiction, but as some sort of reminiscence they could be a lot of fun. That psychopath Perry, for one, would make a nice vignette of some kind, as would our scroungings-around in Washington. I recall that you had a luscious little blonde creature, very acquiescent, whose name I forget, while I was stuck with a WAC radio operator, a skinny redheaded Mormon from Utah named Iris Sparks. I’ve always held that against you, Snider.
In answer to your query, am I ever in the Midwest, the answer is never yet, except on somber nights when the miracle of television carries me as far west as Chicago (I have never in fact been west of Pittsburgh), but this is not to discount the notion that I might come in the future. If I do, I will certainly get in touch with you. Meanwhile, do you ever come east? If you do, please let me know in advance, because we have plenty of room and would like nothing better to put you and yours at ease in Roxbury. Let me hear from you.
All the best,
Bill
P.S. It occurs to me now, if I’m not mistaken, that you were not directly under Lt. Perry, but were merely in the same squadroom where we less fortunate slobs hung out. No matter. Surely you must remember him anyway. Frog-faced fellow with hornrims, and a soul and spirit that would shame a jackal. Sometimes I still dream about him and wake up screaming, rigid with outrage.
TO LEON EDWARDS
February 3, 1958 Roxbury, CT
Dear Leon:
The accompanying clipping, from the N.N. Daily Press of Jan. 31, which Pop sent me, should incline you to believe that there is after all in our universe a divine justice.‖b 150 days in the Denbigh jail, eating collards and fatback with the Negroes I’m sure our Milton despises, should certainly cancel out all the meannesses of the past. I hope therefore that you will shed a tear over this document—as I did—rather than give rein to your baser impulses and laugh like hell (which I really did). Pop assures me that this is the original M. Adams‖c and no cheap counterfeit, and adds that Raymond “is keeping his head above water,” which somehow redresses the balance in a way for which I’m glad. As Pop continues so justly: “with their antecedents, it’s no wonder the whole tribe didn’t spend time in jail.” Which leaves only one question. Who is Mrs. Virginia Toler? It has a good white trash ring, that name, but the sad thing about newspapers is the way they skimp the whole appalling scene—crazy Milton, spittle-mouthed, yelling obscenities, advancing on the poor woman with a brick (this does not seem to be a sex case), while Virginia herself, howling for protection from the monstrous apparition, wakes up all of Ferguson Park and brings forth a horde of welders, drugstore clerks, and deputy sheriffs to the rescue. At least that is the way I envision it, probably unfairly.
Outside of what a series of barium X-rays proved to be a case of “duodenitis” (I cannot find this term in Merck’s manual), I am doing O.K., for a writer. I have just this day passed page 850 on my accursed manuscript, and the end is still not in sight. I will not bore you with a description of the agonies this book has caused me. I have heard it said that out of suffering great things come, and I certainly hope so, since to me at least it would be a colossal irony if all that came out of it was an exacerbated duodenum. I am taking probanthine, also Alka-Seltzer and several other panaceas, and they all seem to help some, but probably the major effect of this disease (which in turn, I’m sure, is caused by the wretched novel) has been to curtail my drinking which—since booze is such a remarkable tranquilizer—is a curse, but also—since I have always tended to drink too much—is no doubt a blessing. Doubtless some day I will have to call upon you to perform that sub-total insertion of my gizzard I’ve read so much about.
Our offspring is due in March and for that month we will be in New York, since Rose’s doctor is at Mt. Sinai. Then I expect that we’ll come back to Roxbury and start cultivating our garden again. I hope that it won’t be too long after that that we will all be able to get together again. We procrastinate entirely too much along that line—renewing old sweet and mournful memories and such—and before you know it we’ll all be a bunch of doddering old idiots with nothing to talk about at all—not even the Adamses. Along the felony line I rather expect Pete Preston to be next, for some especially grotesque and fumbling excursion into sodomy, or maybe Mole Howell (our coeval that is, the one that had underarm problems), though for nothing much more than some kind of inept larceny. I imagine I’m being cruel with these wicked prejudgments, but I didn’t mean to be. It’s just that my memories of Newport News have all gone sour; even the slight nostalgia I had once has all worn off, so that there is a kind of grey blank where my childhood was, and all I can remember is Hopkins Street on a September morning, and all the Downses issuing forth from their lair, and it raining like hell.
All my best to Marianne and the children. Keep up the good work that your last letter reported, and drop a line when you can.
Ever thy Bill
TO LOUIS D. RUBIN, JR.
February 4, 1958 Roxbury, CT
Dear Louis:
Many thanks for your kind invitation and for all the ne
ws of various and sundry—the happiest of which, of course, is Eva’s July 4th issue.‖d Rose joins me in warm and patriotic congratulations. Also I’m glad that you are feeling a bit more at ease at Hollins than in Richmond. I always thought that as a town Richmond was pretty much a dreary pain in the butt, frankly, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the fresher air of the hills.
As for your invitation, I am of course flattered—as I was with your invite some years ago to Baltimore, and its happy results—but this time, even in view of the possibility that some more happy results will ensue, I feel I’ve got to turn you down, and I will try to tell you why as honestly as I can.
In the first place, let me say that whatever my remarks vis-à-vis academics and critics, they do not apply to you. No one was kinder or more generous to me than yourself and thus I am inclined to look upon you as a more or less remarkable and sympathetic anomaly in the dreary groves of academe. Besides, you are a genuinely creative person, which removes you from the herd. So kindly count yourself out of this discussion.
What I am getting at, though, is this: after long and painful and sometimes despairing consideration (despairing because basically I am not an enemy of the ideals of teaching) I have come to the conclusion that the young American writer—the writer, that is, of some guts and independence and vitality, and I modestly include myself—has no greater enemy than the academic critic or scholar such as would be represented at your meeting. To my mind they are the scum of the earth. Want to know why? Because in the whole history of our literature never has a group of people retreated in such a cowardly fashion from the times, from their contemporaries, from life and from books. Never has a group of people so scamped its responsibilities to its coevals (fancy word), turning its back on writers who, beset with enough troubles anyway—TV and mass culture and Christ knows what all, needed a little support more than ever before, and who in the end have come to feel about as unwanted as it is possible to get. Let me quote from Alfred Kazin‖e out of this week’s Reporter: “Serious critics in this country write only in behalf of literature that came to fruition in the 1920’s. This is what they mean by ‘modern literature,’ and in its name they shut the door to the young, the new, the ‘crude,’ the unfamous, the unheard.… It is ‘modern literature’ alone that gives background to critics like Leslie Fiedler … who complains that young novelists are always a terrible bore and that he would rather go to the movies. ‘Modern literature’ is a terrible tyrant. The 1920’s died several world cataclysms back. It is time that we stopped worshipping Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway and made a place for the young.” End of quote. This of Kazin’s is from a review of The Living Novel, a symposium of which—as Kazin himself points out—the prevailing note is self-pity. The last thing on earth I want to do is to sound self-pitying, yet if I were to take you up on your invitation I would have to look out upon that bland safe sea of Faulkner-Fitzgerald-Kafka faces and say, “Why haven’t you paid any attention to me?” Pretty please? And I’ll be damned if I’ll do that.
Indeed, it’s damned hard to approach this subject without sounding self-pitying, try as one might to avoid the tone. No writer worth anything writes, or has ever written, for the benefit or approbation of the academic critic, yet I’ll bet there are few writers whose work hasn’t blossomed a bit in that atmosphere where they felt they were, for better or for worse, at least being taken seriously, making an impression of some sort. The generation of the 20’s—so-called Lost—really had it made. Yet not one of them, to my mind, except Faulkner, ever wrote a novel as fine as The Naked and the Dead, which to this day is regularly being put down as obscene or clumsy or crude—all as if everyone was embarrassed over the initial naive enthusiasm it was received with. Or, worse than that, the book is hardly even mentioned at all any more. As for those few of my coevals who are taken seriously, I’ve gotten so used to picking up the Sewanee or the Kenyon or whatever and seeing long solemn essays on Robie Macauley or Peter Taylor or Andrew Lytle or Caroline Gordon or God knows what all—not to mention such monstrosities as the one by James Gordon Cozzens or whatever his name is—that it takes an act of supreme will for me to come back down to earth and remember that I, too, am a writer and some day might be as good as Robie Macauley.‖f I scarcely have to mention that to my fairly accurate knowledge I never once have profaned the pages, by mention or reference, of a literary quarterly—except in The Hopkins and by unowho.*
But enough of this revolting self-pity. The fact of the matter, when you come right down to it, is that with only a long novella and a single novel under my belt I should hardly expect to be treated like Count Leo Tolstoy. As Kazin says in the same review: “Alas, nowadays American writers want everything they can get from society.” Meaning, I gather, critical praise and popular success and fame and money. Even power, I suppose. We’re all bitch-goddessed up by the idea of success.‖g As for myself, I should be contented (and really am, when I ponder it calmly) with the physical facts of my existence, which allow me to write what I want and at my own pace. I would be a cad to ask for more. Yet, getting back to the same issue, and speaking maybe for some of my contemporaries who haven’t had my luck, it does seem to be a depressing fact that at a time when really good writing tends to get lost in the great deafening shuffle there have been so few critics who have cared or dared to come to the aid of a baffled public, and have tried to separate the good from the indifferent or the merely bad. If there had been, I’ll bet such writers as Shelby Foote, who wrote in “Ride Out” one of the best short novels I’ve ever read, would not have turned as he has to Civil War history—which might be good but it’s not “creation”; if there had been, such shallow trash as Françoise Sagan would have fouled out as she should have; if there had been several of these estimable and vocal critics, as there were back in the golden twenties, maybe—but honestly, there’s hardly any use in belaboring the point.‖h The academics have done a great job of sandbagging the spirit of literature, at least in this generation. I hope they choke on their Joyce and their Hemingway and even old man Faulkner, too.
So at your meeting I would be telling them all this, and I couldn’t tell them without shedding at least one single pearly self-pitying tear. Ergo, all self-respect gone while the Ulysses-exegesists snickered up their academic sleeves. No, I just couldn’t do it. I’d feel like a whore in church and shaking, as they say down home, like a preacher with the clap. What right would I, a mere writer, have to tell a group of littérateurs what place the modern young writer stood in society? I’d have to say no place at all, as far as I could see, and that if they were looking for a culprit look around them. It would be very unpleasant.
But I hope this won’t deter you from getting in touch with us when you come Nawth. In private I don’t talk about such matters at all, and can’t cry over literature. As a matter of fact, I’ve just passed p. 850 in a novel which threatens to outdo even Jim Jones in quantity, and I hope to have it done when the summer’s over.
All the best to Eva and yourself,
Bill
* the most intelligent review I ever received, by the way.‖i
Paola Styron was born on March 13, 1958.
TO NORMAN MAILER
March 17, 1958‖j Roxbury, CT
Norman:
I don’t know who your sick and pitiable “reliable source” is (how much he must hate and envy me, or maybe you, but above all hate himself), but you might have him or her get in touch with me some day and repeat his allegations to my face. Your letter was so mean and contemptible, so revealing of some other attitude toward me aside from my alleged slander, but most importantly, so utterly false, that it does not deserve even this much of a reply.‖k
B.S.
TO MRS. THOMAS P. PEYTON, JR.
June 1, 1958 Roxbury, CT
Dear Mama Peyton,
Many thanks for your sweet letter. I don’t really know how that article happened. There was a girl named Betty Tyler who called me up from Bridgeport. She used to work on the Richmond T.D., and n
ow works in the Bridgeport paper. Anyway, she heard I lived in Roxbury, and so she came up and did an interview with me for Bridgeport and, since she still had Richmond connections, she sent the same article down there to Va. It really wasn’t too bad an article, actually, but I wish she’d left out the part of it which said I got drunk on weekends. Well, the fact of the matter is I do get drunk on weekends, but it’s not the sort of thing you go around publishing in the newspapers. I only wish old Tommy and old Charlie were around more often so I could get drunk (mildly drunk, that is) with them. I certainly do miss those boys, just as I miss all the sweet old Peytons. Many times in the past few years I have thought about the wonderful times we used to have in Crozet, and the wonderful eating—quail and stuffed lettuce, and one Thanksgiving dinner I still recall as the best meal I ever had—and I long for the time to come when we can all get together again.
Styanna knows all her letters and numbers and is mean as hell, but we sure like having her around. Polly is extremely young, as you know, and we are not on speaking terms yet; however, I don’t think it will be too long before she starts taking over the house like Suzanna did.
If you can send me Satan’s address, please do, or better yet tell him to write me. I have heard through the grapevine that he is going great guns in Charleston and I have no doubt that he will be running the company before very long. I would dearly love to see him again. He is the best old friend I ever had.
In the meantime, Rose, Styanna, Polly and I are having a good time in our Connecticut retreat. I hope to have this novel finished by the end of the year—at which point we plan to cruise down to Virginia and maybe we can all have a reunion. I will sleep until noon, Satan can go out and shoot some birds, and we will sing songs en masse after dinner.